The present invention relates to data processing systems. In particular, but not by way of limitation, the present invention relates to systems and methods for enabling data exchanges between various data processing systems, including disparate data processing systems.
Companies are leveraging powerful new business-to-business (B2B) applications and network-based services to collaborate with customers and trading partners throughout the value chain. These companies are redefining existing relationships; creating compelling new relationships; and reaching new markets through a variety of online business models such as public e-marketplaces, private exchanges/supply chains, and direct trading partner links.
To fully capitalize on these new business applications and relationships, individual companies and e-marketplaces need to provide an efficient means of integrating trading partners into the various trading systems that exist today and that will exist tomorrow. Although most companies understand the benefit of such integration, these companies have also seen other companies undergo expensive, time-consuming projects to integrate their business systems, their trading partners"" business systems, and the new technology. Rather than embarking on these expensive, time-consuming integration projects, many companies have avoided the process and instead, have opted to use electronic catalogs and to manually process B2B transactions. In other words, many companies have opted to manually reenter data into their backend systems even though the data was previously transmitted to them electronically through, for example, a web site or email.
Presently, a company""s option for integrating disparate internal and external business systems centers on traditional middleware and custom-coded adapter technologyxe2x80x94many adapters are built on a prepackaged adapter that requires significant customization. Middleware and adapters, however, typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take many months to implement. Although these systems are functional, they are not satisfactory. Accordingly, a system and method are needed to address the shortfalls of present technology and to provide other new and innovative features.
Exemplary embodiments of the present invention that are shown in the drawings are summarized below. These and other embodiments are more fully described in the Detailed Description section. It is to be understood, however, that there is no intention to limit the invention to the forms described in this Summary of the Invention or in the Detailed Description. One skilled in the art can recognize that there are numerous modifications, equivalents and alternative constructions that fall within the spirit and scope of the invention as expressed in the claims.
The present invention can provide a system and method for enabling data exchanges between various data processing systems, including disparate systems, without the typical custom computer code generation generally required to accomplish such integration. In one exemplary embodiment, the present invention can include a message bus disposed between a set of data source recognizers and a set of content recognizers. In this embodiment, the data source recognizers are configured (1) to monitor for incoming/received data originating from an associated data provider such as a trading partner; (2) to extract the received data from a data handler, such as a web server; and (3) post the received data to the message bus. Once the data has been posted to the message bus, the individual content recognizers inspect the data and, if appropriate, pull the data from the message bus for subsequent processing.
An individual content recognizer in this embodiment can be configured to pull, for example, a specific transaction typexe2x80x94such as a purchase order received from a particular trading partnerxe2x80x94from the message bus. The content recognizer can then perform a series of predetermined transactions using the data pulled from the message bus. These steps can include making calls to an application program interface (API), making inserts/deletes to a database table, retrieving data from a database table, sending responses to trading partners, etc. Thus, the content recognizers cannot only pull data from the message bus, they can also post data to the message bus. Notably, this embodiment of the present invention can initiate these transactions across disparate systems, thereby providing integration both between trading partners and an enterprise and between an enterprise""s own backend systems.
In one embodiment, the present invention achieves integration across disparate systems by joining data from disparate systems rather than only data from related database tables. For example, embodiments of the present invention can join data from data systems such as APIs, web services, messaging systems, databases of different types, event messengers, ERP systems and the like. In the structured query language (SQL) of relational databases, a join is a combination of tables in a database using a common element (key). In this context, the concept of a join can be extended to include a combination of data elements from disparate systems and different data structures (e.g., hierarchical and relational.) Even though data from disparate systems is being joined, the join behaves the same as if two tables from the same database type were being joined. One implementation of the join process is described in commonly owned and assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/798,572, entitled Presenting and Structurally Representing General-Purpose Data Sources.
The join of data from these disparate systems can be represented as a node in a hierarchical structure, e.g., tree. This node can then be mapped to the fields of an incoming document so that data fields in the incoming document can be recognized and easily used by the content recognizers, or other modules, in subsequent transactions. By joining disparate data sources, embodiments of the present invention, with a minimal amount of custom-coding, can enable the creation of a transaction process that uses several disparate systems. Joining of data from disparate data sources, however, is not necessarily required for the operation of the present invention.
In one embodiment, data from disparate data systems can be integrated through a conversion process called flattening. Flattening, in one implementation, can convert hierarchical data into tabular data. For example, flattening can convert an XML document into a table and/or tabular data into an XML document. Notably, flattening can be used in any system that needs to convert between hierarchical data and tabular data.
As previously stated, the above-described embodiments and implementations are for illustration purposes only. Numerous other embodiments, implementations, and details of the invention are easily recognized by those of skill in the art from the following descriptions and claims.